The bandwidth requirement for consumer electronics and personal computing data buses has been rapidly increasing due to the increase in storage capacity and display resolution. At the same time, the latency for data buses is expected to decrease. As a result, the bit rate for data buses employed in these applications has increased significantly in recent years. Copper cables conventionally used for data transmission can no longer meet the increasing trend of the bandwidth requirement. To meet the bandwidth requirement, optical fibers are used for data transmission. An active optical cable makes use of an embedded optical transceiver and an optical fiber to facilitate high-speed data transmission while still providing electrical interfaces compatible with conventional connectors. Compared with copper cables, active optical cables usually have bulkier cable plugs due to the need to accommodate additional opto-mechanical plug structures for optical coupling.